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"I just wish there was a standard way of tuning in to internet radio and standard codecs. That might all exist already, never really looked into it. DNS SRV records would be perfect for this as you could just tune in to 6music@bbc.co.uk, then the stream server is located through DNS."

Where are they

I've had a look for the two Asus models in the UK, the 11" one is out of stock everywhere and the 13" one is on sale only at DSG for £1149 in an i7/128GB guise which is too much money.

I have an OK laptop at the moment, it's still going OK and it's not too slow so I'm going to wait until one of the manufactures comes out with something that ticks all the boxes. The Asus is almost there but I've heard reports of poor wireless performance, dodgy touchpad drivers and crummy screen. If I'm paying top prices for a laptop it needs to be perfect.

SSL

Presumably this is just a simple wire tap type of filter so any comms can be intercepted without having to talk to anyone. In which case running facebook under SSL (which everyone should be doing anyway) will stop it.

If on the other hand facebook have to provide the Swedish authorities access to any data on request then it's a different matter.

This is a problem that's easily solved. What Google need to do is police the Android Marketplace more heavily, allow any app but make sure the app is safe before it gets out there. Then still allow users to install apps through other stores or manually. That way everyone is happy, all apps can be catered for and if you stick to the official market place you are guaranteed a reasonably level of security.

Virgin's big selling point should be that you don't have to waste money paying for a phone line to get broadband or TV (Sky require you to have a phone line for the first 12 months of a TV contract). Yet they insist on bundling in a phone line and charging you for it, of course you can choose to not have a phone line but then the cost of your broadband or TV package goes up by about the same amount.

Problem with the Walkman brand

The problem with the Walkman brand was that it had ceased to be recognised as such. A Walkman had long ago become a generic name for a personal portable cassette player with headphones. People aren't bothered about owning a phone with a built in Walkman; a phone with a built in iPod, now that's a different matter.

Are you sure you've upgraded to Mango? Some of this stuff you've listed is solved.

Web browser... slightly complicated javascript. - The web browser in Mango is IE9 it supports the same websites as IE9 on a desktop PC. The old browser had problems with javascript the new one; I've not noticed any.

- screen lock activates on every screen timeout meaning you have to type a code every few minutes... In Mango you can choose separate times for screen timeout and phone lock

- signal indicator is pretty much absent for no reason... tap the top of the screen and the indicator appears

- no receipts for texts or other messages to confirm delivery... delivery reports are in Mango, I haven't tried them because the stupid O2 network doesn't support them but the options are there

- the pointless search button... Again, in Mango the search button has changed, it now links you in with the new bing functionality. Including the text translation stuff, QR code reader and the local scout which I actually used at the weekend to find a nice restaurant near my hotel in Brighton.

- multitasking... the most disappointing fail in Mango. If you want true battery draining multitasking, get an Android phone. If you want to be able to listen to music whilst you browse the web and pick up where you left off in an application, the Mango implementation is fine.

Tethering

Tethering is in Mango but for some inexplicable reason it's only on the new phones, so my Mozart doesn't have it and neither does your Omnia but the two new HTC phones do and the Nokia phones will as well.

My Mozart is the first phone I've had for 10 years that doesn't support tethering. I haven't used it often but it's nice to know it's there if you need it.

Content

I think Windows Media Centre is a beautiful interface for a PVR. Very easy to get around and makes good use of extra information that can be pulled down from the Internet.

Problem is I can only use it with Freeview or Freesat. If I want channels from Sky or Virgin I have to use a Sky box or a Virgin box. It doesn't matter that what I have can do everything those boxes do. Their encryption systems won't let me without some sort of hack.

You're missing the distinction. When Google first started one of the things I liked about it was that all the search terms were included by default. Then about a year ago Google decided that they knew what they were searching for better than you did. First it was fairly useful stuff like searching for plural and non plural search terms, searching for UK and US English spellings of words. Then they started including roots of words, you search for playing, you get results for play, and synonyms.

Now Google just drops words from your query if they make the results too limited. When I use + in my searches I'm not trying to find an exact phrase. I just want to see all the pages that contain every one of those words.

Been available on RAID controllers for ages

All the new HP RAID controllers have this tech. They call it flash backed write cache.

I don't quite get the point of this for use on RAM chips though. Unless you're using a RAM disk you can't write files to RAM so the only benefit here is that you can suspend to RAM without any power usage but you can always use hibernate for that..

"VDI is essentially a solution to the problem "how can we sell more servers?""

I was thinking the same thing about VDI. I currently manage a network which is a mixture of desktop PCs and thin/zero clients connected to Citrix XenApp (what was metaframe) servers. When I first started with Citrix your limit was about 20-30 users per server, less if your users were doing anything clever.

Now I can get 100 users on a server without it really breaking sweat and the servers cost me less money than they used to.

The first time I saw VDI was in HP's product bulletin, they were advertising a system where you had a low power PC on your desktop driven by a workstation blade in the server room. So instead of a desktop PC you buy a cheap desktop PC and a server blade which means you also need a slot in a blade chassis. If that's not simply a way to sell more servers I don't know what is.

hardware design

Looks poor, it doesn't even have front facing audio and USB. It's almost a cube so doesn't lend itself to mounting on the back of a monitor or under a desk. Headphones and microphone input are on the same connector.

I'm really liking the zero client concept, we're running the wyse xenith boxes. They boot and display a login prompt within a couple of seconds and use around 5W running.

This is the thing, ask any body about a brand of drive and you will always get a group of people saying the won't touch them and they're the worst drives going.

I've had drives fail on me from all manufactures. Seagate, WD, IBM/Hitachi, Maxtor (In their day) and Samsung all make decent drives, some of which fail. Failing drives is the nature of having a lump of metal spinning at 7500 RPM. I think the only drives I've never had fail are Toshiba ones but I've dealt with far fewer of those over the years so I don't think they're any less likely to suffer an issue.

Once you start dealing with drives in hundreds rather than 2 or 3 you'll see that they are all very similar.

I own two SSDs one of them failed inside the first 3 months, the other one bought around the same time and the replacement for the first are fine.

Doesn't matter how big your drive is, if you want to keep your data you need to have it backed up. If you can't afford to be without your data whilst a broken drive is replaced/repaired you also need to be running RAID.

Stop messing with the interface

"...with a redesigned interface that allowed for touch control..."

What's wrong with the current interface, it works well for me. By all means tweak it, polish it, but don't make me learn where everything is again, and why does everything need touch control. People aren't going to be doing db administration or writing SQL queries on a tablet. SQL server is not Angry birds.

standard

There needs to be a standard measure for phone battery life. There is one for digital camera usage, generally you expect to get more pictures out of your battery than the standard measurement suggests but the important thing is that it's standard so it's possible to compare two different makes/models of camera.

As far as I can tell, the "standard" way to list smartphone battery life is to turn it on, possibly in flight mode, and then leave it to see how long the battery lasts.

I have smartphones on my desk that I use for testing. I'm amazed by how long they last when you don't use them. I can get over a week out of a battery that is gone in less than 24 hours of normal use.

I'm pretty happy with my Acer Revo running windows media centre. I have Freeview HD and satellite (DVB-S2), plenty of space for recordings and it can play all my media off of local drives, USB or network. It can also stream nicely from the Internet.

Total cost was more than most of the receivers here bar the technomate. Only feature it's missing is the transcode of AAC into DD5.1 on the freeview HD channels.

Digital outputs?

So the digital file, lets assume you're using apple lossless, is converted to Analogue by the ipod using whatever cheap D/A converter Apple were sourcing at the time. This is then passed over the dock connector into the dock where it is converted back to digital to be sent over a cable to your D/A converter to be converted back to analogue again.

I'm sure that helps improve the quality.

What exactly is in this dock apart from this pointless conversion that makes it worth £150? An ipod dock should simply be a passthru for the AV connections and a method of remote control.

Good for pubs

This ruling is great for pubs, unfortunately it doesn't help people at home much. A subscription to any EU based premier league football will set you back more than a sky subscription so isn't worth shopping around.

I don't think Sky will lose too much sleep over it. 1 pub is only equivalent to 10 homes in terms of revenue. Also most pubs I go to that have an alternative satellite system have it just so they can show the 3pm games and they also have a UK sky system for everything else.

bending the truth

"The cheapest Kindle on sale this morning sets you back $139, or $189 for the 3G model. The floor now drops to $79 and $149."

Is this a quote from Jeff?

The old 3G model is $189 without ads, that's the same price as the new 3G touch without ads. With ads the old 3G model is $139, $10 cheaper than the new model.

My guess is they'll kill off the old model in favour of the touch screen model, I guess that's a good idea the keyboard doesn't get much use so it just takes up space.

Has anyone seen the new basic model in action? How do you find books on the store when there's no keyboard? I guess it's a case of: left, left, left, click (A), right right down down click (space) I'd stop being such a cheapskate and pay the extra $20 to get the touch screen.

Unsurprisingly there's no 3G on the fire, it's one thing giving away free 3G for an e-ink device but on a colour tablet with a proper web browser you're going to incur some serious charges. It'll be interesting to see how locked down the tablet is. If it's a fully functioning Android tablet with the only condition being you have to get all your apps through Amazon it might be worth it.

Java

Java is a menace, if you have an application that mandates a particular version of Java then you can't update. Obviously this is just sloppy coding that ties an application to a version but it means that corporate desktops are wide open to this kind of attack.

Flash is very nearly as bad. The auto mechanism requires you to be an administrator on your computer. Keeping flash up to date using group policy requires you to constantly check version numbers.

Say what you like about Microsoft but WSUS is a fantastic tool for keeping all your Microsoft software patched across a large deployment of computers.

Totally

16:9 is a stupid ratio on a small screen unless you're only using it to watch films. And if all you're doing is watching films then you can buy a portable DVD player for much less money.

If 16:9 is good because it's better for films then maybe we should be using 1:2.35 screens on our laptops.

A 3:2 aspect screen would probably be a good ratio. The most important thing is that it's possible to buy screens with a sensible number of vertical pixels. Modern software can make use of high resolution screens. Windows has DPI settings so that the gui appears the correct size. Websites can be zoomed to make them readable but everything is nice and sharp.

My phone has a 3.7" screen with 800x480 resolution, I want that kind of DPI level on my laptop.

idiots

Really?

Your scenario concerning abusive fiancées makes no sense. First off the fiancée has to find out the mac address, how are they going to do that? If they no it already then they already know where the person is because the only place they're going to find that information is from the AP.

Also it's trivial to change the mac address/SSID etc. of the router. Chances are if this person is trying to hide they've also changed their phone number, ISP, router etc.

I just can't see a problem with it, Microsoft and Apple are doing exactly the same thing.

It's not about getting BT to let you use their cable. The point is that they should be letting other companies use their ducting and poles. One of the major costs of installing any kind of cable system is digging up the roads. BT don't need to do this because they were gifted a network by the government.

Patch Tuesday is once a month to allow people to plan updates correctly. Once you're managing patches for more than 20 or so computers you can't afford to be testing and releasing updates every week.

Couple that with the fact that even most home users don't want to be continually bombarded with patches and please reboot messages.

If you're insane you can still download all the individual patches and install them manually, but if you're a normal individual you just use the windows update process. If you're a business then you use WSUS.

Microsoft update all software that they supply via the update mechanism. Linux distros update all the software they supply, no difference. Maybe Microsoft will launch an Apple style app store for windows. If they do this you'll start seeing updates for other 3rd party software.

that's not the point

The point is not that the Samsung tab looks like an ipad, yes it does, quite a lot. The point is that the design is obvious and Apple shouldn't have the right to stop other companies making similar designs.

If I was going to design a tablet I'd come up with something very similar. If I'd designed it 7 or 8 years ago it probably would have looked the same but with a brushed chrome finish rather than the shiny black because that would have looked modern. The design of the device is obvious, it's a screen with a bezel.

Already happens

"As for not charging people national rates when they dial the full national number - forgive my cynicism but HAH! That will work without anyone getting overcharged (I don't think!)"

This system is already in place and works, I live in Manchester dial code is 0161. I can dial 01204 (Bolton), 01457 (Glossop), 01565 (Kutsford) and a few others and they are counted as local calls.

If you dial same area without using the dialling code, the billing software assumes the dialling code. In the same way that from your mobile you can dial your numbers starting with +44 but you don't get charged for an international call.

Very odd

surely the solution is to move a digit from the code to the local number.

Bournemouth is currently 01202, just remove the last 2, prefix all numbers in Bournemouth with a 2 and suddenly you have an extra 8000000 or so numbers. Forcing the dialling of the area code only seems to create 100000 extra numbers.

Blame

I don't see how this was the hospitals fault, they had a system in place to only allow the use of approved memory sticks. If the student was stupid enough to think that making a copy of that data was OK then I don't want that student to become a doctor.

Not so sure

The MEMS screens I've seen don't look as nice as e-ink and anybody who's ever used an e-ink based screen on a sunny beach will understand how much better the technology is than an LCD screen for this kind of application.